First and foremost, Jonathan clearly doesn’t know US history — with some exceptions, we did charge for high school until after WWII. It was mostly private “academies” before that. Likewise, universal “free” Kindergarten didn’t arrive until the mid/late 1970s, before that it was mostly run by churches for a modest tuition fee.

As for medical training, there used to be two different ways to get a nursing license — one could go to college (as now) *or* one could apprentice at a hospital. Such “hospital nurses” knew more about the procedures and practices of the particular hospital they trained in so they tended to work there (which is why the hospitals had the programs) while “college nurses” knew more about nursing in general, but needed orientation to the specific hospital they got hired at.

Remember that this was when pregnancy was “considered a resignation”, i.e. they were routinely fired upon pregnancy, sometimes upon marriage, so there was a need for a lot of new nurses to replace those who had thus been removed.

In his book “MASH”, Robert Hooker (Hawkeye) wrote of the character that would become Frank Burns, how Burns “learned surgery from his father, who also didn’t know any” — I read that to be apprenticeship, and to have been drafted as a MD, Burns would have had his MD license by 1951 at the latest.

Yes there was Harvard Med but at least some states still had apprentice training for MDs into the mid 20th Century.

As to law, Northeastern School of Law started with a group of people who arranged for noted lawyers to teach law classes at night. A far cry from the ABA approved law schools of today, but also at a far more reasonable price, and all states back then permitted one to “read law” — to apprentice as a lawyer.

45 years ago, Bill Bennet (Reagan’s ED secretary) predicted that all student loans would do is inflate the cost of college and make it even less affordable and he was right. Now as to the poor, a young Black man in Western Massachusetts didn’t have the money to attend Harvard, but he did — WEB DuBois, you may have heard of him.

And do not forget that both the Normal Schools and Land Grant Colleges — and most public IHEs (including most of the HBCUs) started as one or the other — were (and still are) heavily subsidized by state taxpayers. (The difference now is the loans have permitted the largess that these once-spartan institutions weren’t spending money on back then.

In his biography, GE’s Jack Welch said that he went to UMass Amherst because it was only $50 a year — $550 in today’s money. Not the $35,815 it does cost. And faculty are part of the problem — they are paid a lot more and teach a lot fewer classes than they did in the 1950s.

As I think about this, why not apply to high school too? Why should impecunious students get a free ride?

A good principle too for medical care.

If Trump would apply this thinking, the deficit would not keep increasing, as Elon Musk claims it is.